For months, they’ve been looking forward to the president’s announcement of changes to the way these programs are handled. But the string of pre-speech reports suggesting he’s likely to punt some of the toughest calls to Congress have left them, yet again, anticipating a letdown by a president they once considered an ally.

Text Size

-

+

reset

“It would be a shocking disappointment if the president ignored one of the primary recommendations of his own hand-picked review group, which includes a former White House counterterrorism czar and a former CIA deputy director — all of whom agree the problems with storing this data outweigh the benefit,” said Kevin Bankston, a privacy expert with the New America Foundation. “The president will be going against the consensus of his own review group, the privacy and civil liberties community and the Internet company community.”

Some advocates — who had initially looked to Obama to change the way the war on terror was conducted — still seemed reluctant to adjust their expectations.

“I’m looking for him to take leadership here,” said American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel Michelle Richardson, adding that she would view it as “a failure” if the president doesn’t squarely declare his opposition to the government’s bulk collection of data.

Reform backers are looking for decisive action — for the president to decisively shift course, using the full extent of his executive power to revamp the way foreign and domestic surveillance is conducted. But they’re more likely to wind up with something that looks a lot like the status quo by way of a series of small-bore changes and extensive consultation with lawmakers.

Still, senior administration officials signaled early Friday that the worst fears civil liberties and privacy advocates had about Obama’s reform plans would not be realized.

After two weeks of press reports that the president was leaning back and forth on the question of where to hold the trove of telephone data currently maintained by the NSA, the officials said Friday Obama had concluded that it should be kept in the private sector.

Officials said Obama will ask Attorney General Eric Holder and intelligence officials to come up with a more detailed plan of how to do that over the next two months.In the meantime, Obama will keep the data with the NSA and available to the government, the officials said, but will seek a mechanism to get court approval before it is queried.

Shortly before the speech Friday, it was still unclear how the president planned to deal with other recommendations important to the civil liberties and privacy activists, such as the review group’s suggestion that a judge’s approval also be required for subpoenas known as National Security Letters issued by the FBI in terrorism investigations.

In fact, Obama himself has long offered clues he’s unlikely to embrace a majority of the most sweeping changes favored by privacy and civil liberties advocates, citing national security needs. “In the abstract, you can complain about Big Brother and how this is a potential … program run amok. But when you actually look at the details, then I think we’ve struck the right balance,” he said last summer, shortly after the existence of some of the most controversial programs was first revealed.

For some dyed-in-the-wool civil libertarians, Obama’s reluctance to adopt major reforms to domestic surveillance programs would be the latest disappointment in a long series of letdowns — from the failure to close Guantánamo to reversal of the decision to hold civilian trials for the alleged Sept. 11 plotters to the ramping up of deadly drone strikes that in at least one case targeted and killed an American citizen.

Now comes news that Obama is unlikely to embrace a key surveillance reform urged by an outside review panel he appointed: ending the National Security Agency’s collection of metadata on a huge number of telephone calls made or received by Americans.

“When you look at Obama’s campaign speeches and then look at what he did when he got into office, it’s very easy to say he’s a hypocrite,” said Harvey Silverglate, a criminal defense attorney and author. “I don’t actually think that’s true. I no longer have the highest regard for him, but that’s because of weakness, not hypocrisy.”

Silverglate said some Americans’ expectations that Obama would rein in the national security state were wildly inflated.

“He has been terrified by the bureaucracy,” said the defense lawyer, who added that he voted for Obama in 2008 and the libertarian presidential candidate — former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson — in 2012. “I think it would take an absolutely extraordinary president to resist.”

As privacy advocates have become more concerned about the White House’s surveillance reform plan, officials in the intelligence and counterterrorism community have expressed increasing relief, convinced that they’ve persuaded Obama to turn down some of the proposals about which they were most concerned. Those include the review group’s suggestion that judicial approval be required for National Security Letters, which are administrative subpoenas the FBI uses to track down telephone subscribers and authors of suspicious Internet postings, as well as for broader information-gathering efforts that remain classified.

“From the intelligence community’s perspective, I think people are generally OK with the things Obama will propose,” said Michael Leiter, former director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “The pieces people were really upset about they’ve already gotten him not to adopt.”

Officials expect Obama to put some limits on the metadata program by reducing the amount of time the information is kept and further restricting how broadly it can be searched, but they don’t see him shuttering the program altogether.

“The bottom line will be changes that are not cosmetic, but also ones that will certainly not herald a revolutionary change in how intelligence is collected, analyzed and distributed,” Leiter said.

Feeding the sense of looming disappointment among some advocates on the NSA issue had been signals Obama and other officials had sent in recent weeks that the president would sign on to major changes in the metadata program that had seemed to shift earlier this week, as reports in The New York Times and elsewhere suggested Obama would not declare support for that reform.

In December, Obama seemed like he was open to keeping the call data in the private sector and might even be leaning in that direction, although he also talked about potential complications.